“Risk and Revelation”
Luke 23:1-5, 13-25
Good Friday 2014
Allen Huff
In Luke’s gospel, Pilate says it three times:
“I find no basis for an accusation against this man…
“I have examined him…and have not found this man guilty of
any of your charges…
“I have found in him no ground for the sentence of death…”
It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it? Not only can Pilate find no threat in this
Galilean rabbi being accused by his peers of political subversion, but
according to gospel accounts, he actually makes the effort to look.
Not a great deal is known about Pontius Pilate, except that
during his ten-year term as the emperor’s procurator of Judea he developed a
reputation for taking pathological delight in inflicting violence against the
Jews. Apparently, Pilate even created
opportunities to persecute and execute as many Jews as possible, and all in the
name of Caesar. In fact, one of the
things we do know about Pilate is that he so flagrantly bullied and baited the
Jews, that in the year 36 or 37 Caesar not only fired him but exiled him.1 The job of a procurator was to maintain Roman
law and order, but it seems that earlier procurators and the emperor
himself were aware that one cannot effectively keep order through abuse – not
for long, anyway.
By the time of Jesus’ trial, a brutal Pilate has executed
countless would-be messiahs, and most of them without benefit of trial. So, it would be most uncharacteristic of him
to argue on behalf of yet another Jew claiming to be the long-awaited Messiah.
Why, then, why do all four canonical gospels portray Pilate
as somewhat conflicted over what to do with Jesus? The most familiar answers to that question
are summed up in Jesus’ comment to Pilate in John 19: “You would have no power
over me unless it had been given to you from above.”
‘Rome has nothing on God,’ says Jesus. ‘Your empire may intimidate, torture, and
kill God’s people. You may cause
irreparable damage to many bodies and minds.
And you may flatter yourselves saying, See how quickly the Jews will
abandon their God and put their faith in sword and spear like the rest
of us.
‘But,’ says Jesus, ‘the arc of history does not belong to
power and wealth. It belongs to Love.'
‘Pay attention,’ say both Jesus and the gospel
writers. ‘On Friday, God is at work,
revealing to all with eyes to see and ears to hear that human violence cannot
hinder Love. God is not some kind of
human construct who can become so overcome with anger and offense as to lose
the will and power to be God – to be Love.’
The entire life and witness of Jesus says to us that
nothing in heaven or on earth can sink God into our obsession with violence,
indeed, our love of violence.
God cannot be rendered so impotent as to be forced to
resort to sadistic revenge as a means of grace.
Friday is not about satisfying some adolescent deity with
innocent blood. It is about God entering
humanity’s inhumanity in vulnerable, self-emptying Love.
Friday is about God entering our brokenness to reveal the
pitiful futility of our addiction to the brutal ways and means upon which
principalities and powers depend.
Friday is Good because it reveals to us that God
does not share our loveless fear.
Friday is Good because it reveals to us that,
indeed, nothing at all can separate us from the Love not just of God,
but from the Love that is God in Christ Jesus.
Friday, then, is a day of confession. Today we confess that we are not only much
quicker to trust power and wealth, we are even quick to credit God with our
idolatry of those things. Yes, God
desires our well-being, but in deliberate fear we choose to mistake all of our
creation-polluting and neighbor-starving excesses for holy blessing. And we are even quicker to judge and condemn
all who threaten our comfortable certainty with the disarming truth of grace.
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,” wails Jesus, “the city that kills
the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Matthew 23:37a)
For two thousand years, many who have called themselves
followers of Jesus have turned the gospel accounts of Friday into sanction for
persecuting the Jews – Jesus’ own people.
But the point of these stories is to say that most often it is from
within the family of faith that the deepest faithlessness arises. When we distort the unsettling Love of God,
we crucify God’s image within us and God's presence among us.
Think of the people to whom we shut our doors saying, ‘Come
back when you look, or think, or act like us.’
Think of the ways the Church has been silent or even
complicit in the face of sins such as human slavery, genocide, war, poverty,
and pollution of the creation.
Friday reminds us that there is no them to blame or
condemn. Friday reminds us that it is
our own rabid shouts of selfish and impatient fear that send Jesus to the
cross.
Most importantly, Friday reminds us that the God embodied
in Jesus does not need violence or call for innocent blood. Any god who must kill those whom that god
loves in order to have his capacity to love restored isn't much of a god. Or perhaps we should say that he is nothing
more than a god, an
all-too-human idol.
“All who make idols are
nothing,” laments Isaiah, “and the things they delight in do not profit...Who
would fashion a god or cast an image that can do no good? Look, all its devotees shall be put to shame;
the artisans [themselves]
are merely human.” (Isaiah 44:9a, 10-11a)
No, we cannot pin
Friday's cruelty on an angry God.
We make that demand. So it is in truly radical grace that Jesus
follows through with a life of love and peace that we, who would prefer a
militant messiah, cannot abide. He goes
willingly into Friday. He bears through
with purposed intent to reveal to us, to reveal for us, that our unnatural craving for violence
will never satisfy the Creator or redeem the Creation.2
In Jesus, the Christ, God
takes the terrible and gracious risk of Friday to expose the slothful vanity of
our self-worshiping, our neighbor-crushing, and our creation-abusing sin.
And then – and then to save us from all of that, God
follows the risk of Friday with the glorifying and gracious revelation of
Sunday.
1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pontius_Pilate and http://www.biography.com/people/pontius-pilate-9440686#awesm=~oBLiedyoqLi1fo
2While I
don't quote either author directly, I am grateful to Philip Newell and Richard
Rohr for helping to reshape my theology of the cross.A
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